Jazz historian and radio programer Michael Gourrier at the Satchmo Summerfest Lecture Series in 2007. Credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

A St. Augustine High School graduate, Michael J. Gourrier earned a medical technology degree at Xavier University in 1962, and a graduate degree in hematology/cytology from The Ohio State University in 1964. 

So, why is he known as Mr. Jazz?

“Michael knows more about jazz than most people will ever know,” longtime WWOZ-FM Program Director Dwayne Breashears said in a 2008 profile on the Jazz Fest Forum. “That’s why they call him Mr. Jazz.”

Born in New Orleans in 1940, Gourrier worked at WWOZ-FM for 24 years as a DJ and senior programmer, starting in 1982.

“The main thrust of my presentations on the radio has been in the jazz venue,” Gourrier said in the 1994 Behind the Veil Oral History Project conducted by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. “The main focus being on the bebop period, but then also subsequent artists who emulated and perpetuated that particular style.”

He added that “a lot of people are under the misconception that Storyville was a place where the (jazz) bands really got started, but it wasn’t actually in Storyville, but more so in the neighborhood clubs and also in the fraternal organization clubs.”

Hurricane Katrina forced Gourrier to leave New Orleans in 2005. “Floodwaters ruined most of the 12,000 CDs, 8,000 LPs and 500 books and memorabilia that Gourrier kept in a specially built room in his 9th Ward home,” the Forum states.

After moving to Richmond, Va., Gourrier worked as a clinical cytologist from 2006-2011, and volunteered as a DJ at WRIR-FM. Currently, he is the jazz director.

“It’s time for another edition of ‘Bebop and Beyond with Mr. Jazz,’ ” Gourrier says to start of his show. “I’m your host …inviting you to stay tuned for America’s contemporary classical music, the idiom we know as jazz.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...